


Conducting Light

by SinningVirtue



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Ambiguous Relationships, Hounds of Baskerville, M/M, PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-08
Updated: 2013-03-08
Packaged: 2017-12-04 16:09:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/712595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SinningVirtue/pseuds/SinningVirtue
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The lab is night, red and yellow playing softly in waves as emergency lights flicker in time with John's pulse. An unsteady thrum.<br/>He hears a bark that snaps like a gunshot.<br/>The air is foggy with smoke—<br/>or<br/>dust.<br/>He doesn’t know anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conducting Light

**Author's Note:**

> So I've seen this idea done about twice, and I wanted to take my own go at it. Thank you so much for reading, and for all the support on my other Sherlock works.  
> Please leave a comment if you like it, if you want something else like it, etc.  
> Thanks again!  
> -Han

Conducting Light

 

The light throbs.

 

It’s a strobe light of emergency red that paints his skin in passionate second-long worlds of fire. The smoke fills every corner of him, curls there and sprawls out, lazy and content inside the thin walls of his lungs. He hears a noise like heavy breathing, like claws on a cool laminate floor, like radio static.

 

He hisses air between his teeth and can feel his heartbeat threaten his ribcage, rage against the barriers. He counts seconds, tells himself it’s all a dream. But he can see Sherlock in his head, white-faced and sick looking with fear. Alive with it. Writhing with it.

 

He doesn’t want that.

 

John stutters out a breath, scrambles against the shiny floor, _runs._

 

He feels like a piece of his brain has clicked wrong, some synapse has fired when it shouldn't have—because all the fear rushes up at once and suddenly it’s all he can do to swallow it down.

 

His blood surges through him, and he hears Bill Murray curse in a corner of his mind. He stumbles over delicate lab equipment, hears the shattering of grenades through house windows. Shadows thrash against the edges of his vision, and he thinks he sees the spines of the Hindu Kush.

 

The hound is coming for him, the Taliban are hiding just behind the steel desks.

 

A growl shivers down his spine and an IED explodes in his memory.

 

John throws himself against the door, scrambles for the handle, his hands dry and trembling.

 

Locked.

 

In a moment his phone is out and he’s dialing and he presses the phone to his ear and his voice comes out soft and normal when he prays ‘don’t be ridiculous, pick up the phone’ and of course Sherlock doesn’t and he can feel the desert night cold and sharp against his face and the hound slowly stalking through the shadows of the dark lab and he doesn’t even know why he bothered to call in the first place because _Sherlock can’t get him out of Afghanistan_.

 

He doesn’t know if an alarm is sounding. If it’s just his imagination, but the sound rocks down through him, makes him sag against the thick door, makes his eyes flicker, _thrum_ , across the space. Trying to make out the huge, hulking thing that hovers on the very edge of his sight.

 

He’s dreaming.

 

He has to be.

_Wake up. Don’t worry. Just wake up._

 

He wonders what he must look like, pressed up against the wall as if he could dissolve into it, a rain of gunshots and feral growls cascading down on him.

 

Hand pressed over his mouth, he quiets his breathing with force. He thinks it’s possible to hear his heart beating from upstairs. 

 

He can’t breathe.

 

The air is foggy with smoke—

 

or

 

dust.

 

He doesn’t know anymore.

 

The night is clear, stars pinpricking the canvas in patterns John could find but rarely bothers to, because he likes the whole image of an unbridled sky more than any constellation. There are wild flowers blooming softly on a steady incline at the base of the Kush, and John can just make out their blurred pink from this distance. And the lab’s cold slithers down his spine. A hound stalks through the flowers.

 

He meets the eyes of the enemy when they are only fifteen yards from him, silent on the back of the wind. He pushes Murray, who drops like lead to the gritty surface of the earth and hugs it like he belongs there. His hands are on his head.

 

John mirrors him in the dark of the lab, his fingers clutching at his hair, which has grown longer in the months he’s lived with Sherlock.

 

A bark, a gunshot, the glimmer of a knife, a cave, a lab, a cage.

 

He sprints, his body flying on the back of a wind his mind supplies for him, and he can see the bars like he can see the leaky floor of a cave nestled up deep in the mountains, where no one can hear the echoes. John thinks he makes a noise, something like a soft, breakable whimper in the darkness as he skids on the last step and slams into the large cage centered in the middle of the lab. Too big for a dog, kept in pristine condition. He throws back the thin white sheet covering it and launches himself inside.

 

His fingers slip on the latch.

 

He inhales.

 

Presses himself against the sides.

 

Bill Murray bleeds slowly onto the cave floor, and John wonders if he’s been hit. He doesn’t remember, can’t tell. Everything hurts and nothing is real and he doesn’t know where he is and the growl shakes the very skies above Afghanistan.

 

His leg—

 

His shoulder—

 

The blood isn’t Bill’s.

 

Bill is looking at him, horrified and weak and whispering ‘please just tell them something they want. John. Please.’ and _how long have they been here?_ Bill’s eyes are a soft, warm brown, and his hands are rough as they tend to superficial wounds that leak and draw the scent of a monster.

 

His phone rings—a radio?

 

The hound shakes with fury outside the cage, whuffs softly and scents him. Tastes his fear.

 

He answers.

 

“ _Captain John Watson, Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers requesting MedEvac_ ,” John hisses into the radio, the night wrapping around him and his worn bandages. They’ve broken Murray’s legs, so John drags him, says something about hoping they don’t notice what they’ve taken, the radio they fiddled with beneath the starlight until frequency was found. John bleeds steadily. “ _Last known coordinates: 35°19′ N 69°1′36 E. Break. 2 Alpha Urgent. Repeat. Alpha.  Break. X-ray. I repeat. X-ray hot-zone. There’s a hound_ \-- _”_

 

“John?”

 

Sherlock’s voice is thin—strained around the edges of a calm that John has come to memorize.

 

Bit not good.

 

“John, where are you?”

 

“ _I need a MedEvac_ ,” he shudders out, feeling the bars dig into his back. “ _It’s in here with me. You have to get us out._ ”

 

“Us?” the voice on the other end demands, and John had said two Alphas, right? Two soldiers in need of emergency evacuation?

 

“ _Murray—Murray got us out. Or. I did. I don’t remember. But_ it’s in here.”

 

The hulking shadow of a hound draws across his vision, and a stunted scream escapes John’s lips. He bites down on his tongue until he tastes copper flood his mouth.

 

“Where are you?”

 

“ _The first lab?_ ” The Hindu Kush. The base of it. The night. Afghanistan. Baker Street. Baskerville.

 

A war zone.

 

“I’m coming, _keep talking_ ,” Sherlock says soothingly, and his voice is like the Kabul river, which is both wide and depthless and colorful here at the bottom of the sky-scraper mountains. It swirls in and out of the night. “What do you see, John?”

 

“ _Captain John Watson, Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers requesting a medical evacuation. It’s coming, I can hear it. Captain John Watson, Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers requesting medical evacuation. Can you hear it Sherlock? I can’t see it, it’s too dark out here. Can’t see anything but—the_ sound. _Captain John Watson—can anyone hear me?_ ”

 

“John—John. _I can hear you_ ,” Sherlock answers, and it sounds like he’s pleading. Like he’s praying.

 

“ _Oh_ god _I can see it, it’s here._ ” He can’t breathe. Can’t even move. He’s bleeding out too fast and Murray can’t press hard enough on his wounds and there are pieces of him that have been left behind in those mountains, a raw hunk of meat carved from his leg in some abstract shape that might be art when it scars and his shoulder—he’d never thought getting shot would be like this and it’s been at least a week without treatment and maybe he’s going to lose his arm to the hound pressing in against the bars of his sterile cage. “Please God, let me live _._ ”

 

“Are you alright?” Sherlock demands, pushing back the sheet as the white lights blink back to life. The room is bathed in morning, in a helicopter floodlight. “ _John. **Are you alright**?_ ” His eyes are a wild, pale blue. The color of the edge of the horizon, just before it becomes fuzzy and fades to white.

 

He looks afraid.

 

He presses a gloved hand to John’s shoulder—injured—not—no—

 

John throws himself from the cage, his hands on his knees. He can stand. He can stand. He will make himself stand.

 

“ _It was here!_ ” John shouts, and his voice echoes off the base of the mountains, throws back at him in this shit little valley they’ve found in the middle of the desert. “It was here, I _saw_ it, Sherlock—where’s Bill?”

 

His voice is thin and desperate, clinging to every syllable that drops from his lips and he swings himself in an inelegant arch, searching every crevice of the lab for any sign of Bill’s bloodied camo or the glowing eyes of the beast.

 

He’s on the floor.

 

His palms press into the laminate and that is not sand and this is not there and he is, in fact, here.

 

“Sherlock?” His voice breaks.

 

Sherlock is down with him in an instant, and his eyes are _so blue_ and John can almost make out his reflection. It’s drowned out by the panic present there, and it’s nice to know Sherlock’s human sometimes.

 

“Shh. It’s alright. You’ve been drugged. There is no hound. You’re alright,” Sherlock says slowly, his words elliptical and returning. He repeats himself more than once, lets it sink in through John’s skin until it stitches him back together, leaves him scarred and aware and finding his heartbeat again inside the constant thrum of his fear. “You saw what you expected to see. It’s alright.”

 

“ ** _No it’s not! It’s not alright!_** ”

 

This is the part where Sherlock explains it, when he picks it apart and puts it back together and shows it off for John to see how brilliant he is, how very clever for figuring it all out. This is the part when John pats his head and tells him he’s amazing and wonders how he couldn’t have seen it. This is the part where John is one step behind.

 

“John.”

 

He lays his hand on John’s shoulder again, injured—healed—scarred, and looks at him like he’s seeing him for the first time. John wonders if his sanity is leaking out of his eyes, if his memories are streaming from his ears. Sherlock looks at him like he’s breakable, like he has been broken. Like it’s his fault. Not clever enough to predict John Watson.

 

“ _John_.”

 

And that’s it.

 

John’s shoulders tremble, and he slides down into himself. His fingers grip the lapels of Sherlock’s great coat and he just holds on, rides out the waves and lets things come back to him in slow, steady increments. Bill Murray visited him three weeks ago in London. They went out for a pint. Bill told the bartender about how John saved his life.

 

The lab’s sterile air tastes faintly of chemicals, antiseptic heavy on the tip of his tongue.

 

Sherlock seems to be everywhere, consuming the whole field of his vision as if John could be hurt by the sight of unthreatening lab equipment, as if the room will turn on them the moment the smaller man is free. John’s never been more grateful.

 

His name is repeated like a dirge, near a hymn, crescendos like a violin solo until it’s the only word he thinks he’ll ever know again. And it sounds like so many things he doesn’t understand yet. Like Sherlock is injecting new meanings into his name that John can only guess at.

 

Maybe ‘It’s okay’ or ‘Come back’ or ‘Don’t go’ or ‘I’m sorry’.

 

Maybe it’s none of those.

 

Maybe it’s all of them.

 

John doesn’t know.

 

So he says “ _Sherlock_.” and means ‘ _I want to go home.’_

 

Xx

 

John didn’t sleep last night.

 

He’s briefly considers giving up the practice entirely, but he’s out of army practice of micro-naps of dreamless bliss to keep him alert, and his limbs already feel heavy. When Sherlock hands him a cup of coffee, he briefly considers throwing it at the garden fence. He briefly considers moving out of 221b. He briefly considers calling Bill Murray and saying ‘thank you’ for the compressions and the mop-up in that hell hole for two weeks. Thanks for not breaking.

 

John didn’t sleep last night, stayed pressed into the small window seat with a book he didn’t read, staring out over the low green hills carefully. He knows Sherlock knows, though the detective slept heavily in the center of the one bed, case closed and deprivation catching up to him. He knows Sherlock knows why.

 

“John.”

 

He wonders if Sherlock is going to create a new language using just his name, the different inflections he can put into it manipulating the meaning.

 

The morning is soft and swelled with cool mist, and it’s nothing at all like Afghanistan. John breathes so deep it burns.

 

“I--”

 

“You thought it was in the sugar. You needed to be sure,” John cuts in. He looks up at Sherlock from his seat on a low wall in the small cemetery. “You locked me down there.”

 

Sherlock blinks, swallows, nods in one motion that is still somehow graceful.

 

John thinks of the day before, when Sherlock admitted John was his only friend, when the monster was still a figment of Sherlock’s imagination. When he called John amazing, fantastic, his conductor of light.

 

That seems like years ago.

 

John wonders when he started feeling so old.

 

“I was wrong,” Sherlock says softly, so softly John isn’t sure he’s said it at all. “It won’t happen again.”

 

“Yes, you were wrong.” John’s fingers tremble with the memory, with the fear. “You have _no_ idea—I was so—” He swallows and finds it hard. Finds his throat thick. “What you did to me…”

 

Sherlock sits next to him, draws John’s eyes the way he always does, the way he can never stop doing. Today his gaze is a soft grey-green, filled with something that looks almost like regret. That hand is on his shoulder, ungloved, warmth seeping through his thin button up. The scar tissue is numb, there is no blood, there are no mountains, there is no hound.

 

“Never again,” Sherlock says, and it sounds like a promise.

 

The air plays sweet and gentle against their faces, urges them home with a soft sigh. John can feel himself settling, forgiving, but Sherlock still looks at him like he’s fragile. Like he’s broken John by accident when he took him out to play. He looks lost, deductions streaming through his mind and there must be questions, there must be confessions. There must be _Who’s Bill Murray_ and _What happened to you in the Mountains_ and _Is your limp totally psychosomatic_ and _You’re not supposed to have PTSD_ and _How have you hidden it from me_ and _John, I don’t know the answers, I’m supposed to know the answers_.

 

John Watson must trudge along. He leans into Sherlock’s touch to ground the taller man, to draw him from the dark, confused corners of his mind and let him see the soft morning. He licks his wounds and pretends that they are no longer gaping, because that wrinkled-brow desperate look still lingers behind his eyes and Sherlock doesn’t wear  it well. It looks alien on him. Wrong.

 

John smiles weakly. “Friends don’t drug friends.”

 

Sherlock returns the expression, his lips pulling at the corners as his grip tightens on John. Grounding him in turn.

 

“And diminish my conductor of light? I’d never.”


End file.
